Although our language gives all Talossans around the world something they can call uniquely “theirs”, it is essential to breathe Talossan life into the Talossan language, and one important way to do this is to imbue the language with colorfully-worded phrases that, translated literally, would be nonsensical in other languages. Take an English political idiom as an example – “lame duck”. If we were to translate this directly into Talossan – beca tziep – the Talossan reader would be confused by the sudden mention of an animal in a discussion of an office-holder. To properly translate this English idiom into Talossan would require something like uficial zespartind (departing official), and this does not properly convey all of the meaning that English has wrapped into “lame duck”. While you certainly could translate “an official who is completing the final term of office to which he is entitled” into Talossan (or into any other non-English language), doing so would seem to be a lot of work and would introduce a lot of words that would interrupt good prosaic flow. English was correct to adopt the idiom “lame duck” (originally coined for use in the world of stock trading) to encapsulate a more complex meaning.

Now, each Talossan-language writer could (whether intentionally or not) directly translate idioms from his own native language and “expect” the idiomatic meaning to be understood by his Talossan readers. That is, beca tziep may indeed become (or may already be!) an idiom in Talossan, one that is adopted directly from English into Talossan, and one that depends on a knowledge of English. Surely this is one acceptable way for idioms to “appear” in Talossan.

But to truly take its rightful place in the languages of the world, Talossan needs to establish its own original coinages and reinterpretations. Of course, that is easier said than done – one cannot just make up an idiom and claim that it pervades our language. In my grammar book, El Guizua Compläts, a short section is devoted to existing idioms. A few were found in our language’s long-extant Treisour (word-list), such reçáifarh sieux schpiuns (‘to get one’s spoons’, akin to the English idiom ‘one’s ship coming in’; to receive something long-awaited or hoped-for). Others, admittedly, were original coinages that I had found myself using, such as büvarh del mismeu grif (‘to drink from the same tap’, meaning to be of agreement with someone).

Even the most prolific idiom-creator in the English language (a guy known as William Shakespeare) surely didn’t realize that so many of his clever turns of phrase would be common in everyday conversations centuries later. It was up to Shakespeare’s readers throughout those centuries to turn his poetically-inspired linguistic short-cuts into language-wide idioms. Likewise, it is up to Talossan speakers and readers to identify and use colorful Talossan phrases, in order to give Talossan "flavor" to the Talossan language. Let’s take Talossan beyond the literal and into the colorful, and let’s start speaking a Talossan that a non-Talossan cannot possibly understand.